


Here as on a Darkling Plain

by artyartie



Category: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-20
Updated: 2008-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:28:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1624319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artyartie/pseuds/artyartie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"older than time counted by anxious worried women/ lying awake, calculating the future/ trying to unweave, unwind, unravel/ and piece together the past and the future"  Six years later, Guinevere and Delysia face the inevitability of their loves and losses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here as on a Darkling Plain

**Author's Note:**

> An enormous thank you to otahyoni, who was such a gracious and wonderful beta. The title comes from "Dover Beach," by Matthew Arnold.
> 
> Written for cheapmetaphor

 

 

Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away. Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray Clutch and cling?

Chill fingers of yew be curled Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world.

\- "Four Quartets," T.S. Eliot

***

Time was a damn peculiar thing.

Six years of war and death and waiting-for the queer, bloodless conflict to start, then for the world to stop raining down on their heads; for the lines to ease from Joe's eyes, the creases of his lips, for the grey to recede from his temples, if she only knew the proper terms to offer. Not that she'd come out unscathed, from the lines tugging at her eyes to the diminishing curve of her belly. But they'd come out alive and together, and it was greedy to wish for anything more than that.

"Sarah! My dear, it's been far, far too long." Guinevere wrapped the young woman in her arms. She smelled of rosewater and smoke.

Sarah Perdew nee Delysia LaFoysse, trembled, her voice still a dove's fluttering coo. "I'd cross the Atlantic twenty times to see you, even cooped up in that tin rattler." She pushed an almost threadbare felt hat from her striking blue eyes. "Now, where's your Mister, Mrs. B? Have I told you how much I love your sparkly new name?"

"At the factory. One crisis after another these days, but he promised to be on the last train from Victoria." Joe's path from women's lingerie to gentlemen's socks had strayed into parachutes during the war, and the path back had turned into quite the ramble. Turning silken swords into woolen ploughshares, keeping shy young women the sensible owners of the world would just as soon turn onto the streets, taking the broken soldiers most others would consign to the whims of another's charity. "He's besides himself at seeing you again."

The hope of reunion in this life buoyed every parting, the wish for the last glance to be merely penultimate made it possible to turn away. Some entreaties the good Lord granted. Other comings together had to wait on human forbearance and Heaven's grace.

Guinevere clutched at Sarah's hands, as if to feel that she was flesh and blood, and no celestial apparition. Fingers intertwined and twinkled like two new stars over a dark horizon, their light pale but brilliant against a rapidly falling night. 

***

A single moment could redeem the darkest of hours, a golden hour could salvage the cruelest day. How many passes of the second hand, how many turns of the stars and sun and seasons could atone for six long and savage years and all they took?

Hills barely touched by autumn's slow descent into winter rolled down to the sea, still marred by crimson gouges, as if the bombs had ripped into earth and flesh alike. On the water, a smattering of rainbow-hued fishing vessels bobbed along, dwarfed by the remains of the great fleet, still in their gunmetal grey. 

"You're a regular speed demon!" The wind fluttered through Sarah's Titian curls, turning her into a seaborne goddess. "I'd always thought you'd be Little Miss Careful behind the wheel." 

"My dear, I drove generals and admirals, and I dare say sometimes I made those sailors swear so much even you would blush. But they were never late. Punctuality is a virtue, you know."

"You make it positively sinful," Sarah crooned, her eyes bright with vicarious adoration. "Listen to you and all your adventures - if they'd had you running the war, they could have evacuated Dunkirk with a canoe."

"Oh, I would have needed more than one little dinghy." It was flattering and fearful how much faith Sarah placed into her undeserving hands, which flailed about to ill-ends as often as they did right. No matter the young woman's unfailing trust, Guinevere could not work miracles, not even minor wonders. She'd only nudged this one willing soul along, but the eddies of fate were irresistible. That she should have known, as mundane as her sight was. "Even social secretaries can only work so many miracles."

Her gloves tightened around the wheel, her stomach twisting, weaving and unweaving a tapestry that she'd begun with far younger hands. She'd lived with the frayed, unfinished edges long enough to think of them as a constant, if pale, companion in the place of the one time and a German boy's bullets had taken. 

But if the bullets and their shooter acted on nothing more than a cruel and certain trajectory, Time, at least, was marginally kinder. If it was a thief, it was a naughty child, who slunk back to the scene of the crime with puppy-dog eyes, a wibbling lip, and a peace offering in hand. Time had given her more than she'd ever expected in return, even if he was a grown man by the time he did so. And now Time had this one last kindness for them both, even if the touch of it, for the moment, was more than she could bear - alone, at least.

***

Sea air washed the world clean, a salty tang that purified everything it touched. It couldn't, however, scour the shadows of war that devoured the gaping spaces between buildings. The detritus hovered in the streets, floated atop the water, a glistening, viscous scum, a damn spot that no amount of scouring could ever erase. It reeked of the acrid stench of burning diesel, the cloying mingling of engine oil and sweat rising off men's bodies.

Sarah looked wide-eyed through the window, at the voids where shops and flats and people's lives once filled the hollows. Guinevere had seen too many of these chasms, wondering if the ghosts who haunted them were living or dead, flesh or ashes. Their faces looked the same, regardless. 

"British pluck is one thing, but you didn't say it was so bad."

"After the first go - well, it's not that we were used to it, but it didn't bear dwelling on, besides telling you that Joe and I were quite all right." It was an indulgence to linger on such things, not when she was alive and fed and her husband's arms curled tight around her waist in the darkness, amid the press of the crowd and the earth overhead. "Or how miserably tone deaf our neighbors were on a Saturday night."

"Oh, Guinevere, you're so brave. Jeepers, if it was me, I would've gone to pieces." Sarah turned away from the window, away from the scars of the war still heavy on the land.

"You're hardly without courage, my dear. Waiting takes as much bravery as picking up a rifle." She pulled in front of a once grand hotel, now patched with plaster and scaffolding. Repairing what could be saved, rebuilding what was lost, it was the only thing they could do, again and again. Except for those things, those people, gone beyond recall. And what for them?

A minute, in an hour, on a day, in a month where the world held its breath and waited for the next hour to come, even if the world dashed those hopes more often than it fulfilled them. 

***

There was a bottle of what passed as whiskey on the bureau, and soda that hadn't gone completely flat. Ice rattled in the glasses, cheap but sturdy tumblers that were passably clean. 

"It's not exactly cocktails at the Savoy," she said, offering a pale, limpid drunk to Sarah's outstretched hand. The glasses clinked, and their eyes and smiles met over the bubbles struggling to break the surface.

"But it's so much better company." Sarah slunk into an overstuffed green chintz, one frayed satin pump crossed over the other. "I hear Edith's drinking her new old man's cash as quick as he can bring it in, and doing more than clinking glasses with Jerry, if you get my drift. Phil puts on one show in Germany and now he's the regular cat's pajamas, or so he thinks. The Rabbit's moved onto greener pastures - darling Phil might be her darling little stepson, so I heard. As for Nick-well, the Peacock isn't exactly a phoenix." 

"He hasn't-"

"He has - a marquee and a band and all the extras - and double the cash." A sad smile rubbed at the lip of her glass, leaving a crimson smudge in its wake. "He practically grovelled to have me back."

"Oh, Sarah, you seriously wouldn't consider going back to such a man-"

"Why not? We were the best cabaret act in London, and we weren't too shabby in New York." Slightly chipped nails tapped against the worn fabric of the chair, and her hesitance made Guinevere lean forward.

"There are far better men than him, and one of them would be honored to have you - and would have the sense to know it."

"I'm sure they will! Don't worry, I'm not going back to the snake." Sarah curled her fingers into the shape of a serpentine head brushing against her nose. Her eyes glimmered, not exactly the look of helpless prey. "I may still be a furry little animal, but now I have teeth."

"A regular little mongoose." Guinevere beamed.

"They're absolutely darling and utterly fearless." She clasped Sarah's hands, drawing her closer, across the miles and years that separated them through so much joy and sorrow. "You've been so very brave. I wish I'd even half that when I-"

Guinevere' mouth went dry, and a knot ached in her belly that had nothing to do with hunger. Hunger could be sated, appeased, but grief had a maw that was never satisfied. 

"You would've, if you had a you, like I did. I'd run down for your letters like it was Christmas. And when Michael's stopped coming..." Sarah's smile trembled with the terrible knowledge that left little need for words, even if words were all they had. 

"The silence was the worst of it." Guinevere coughed, aching for her whiskey, but it meant pulling her hands away. "The letters stopped and then the headlines came, staring up from every paper. I didn't sleep until his mother rang me, telling me they'd come with that horrible little letter, saying he was dead." That little slip, a handful of words in a church too small to hold the swell of grief, was the only farewell she'd had in nearly thirty years. 

Sarah blinked, her mascara glistening, threatening to streak down her flushed cheeks. "It took that damned Embassy two weeks to tell me - I called every day, called those dummies who didn't know anything, and then one night man came to the club." Black tendrils trickled from her lashes, salty and dark as the night sea, and the corners of her lips trembled into a smile. "They all want to be heroes when they're little boys - did he want to be a hero?" 

"Not so much a hero, no, just a man doing what he thought was right, what was needed." Just as another boy with a brilliant smile and a strong right hook had done, leaving his young wife in the care of their city, a smoky, tiny club run by a kindly Russian with a big heart and a small wallet, and a social secretary who was no social secretary at all. "They're such good men, and we hardly have any time at all." 

Her vision blurred, the world turning softer, and her fingers came away smudged with black when she dabbed them at her eyes. Sarah had a handkerchief at hand, already streaked with her tears. Their sorrows merged into an indistinct grey blur, quickly tucked again into a pocket, against the heart as well as in it.

"We're going to look like two raccoons when Joe gets here." Their drinks were as watery as their eyes, untouched beyond the first cursory sips. "Two minutes, and I'll have us shiny as new pennies, okay?" Sarah pressed a kiss to her cheek, and her fingers came away not black but pink as the dawn.

"I put myself completely in your hands. It still takes me an hour in the morning to manage all these contraptions and potions. How you do it so quickly is a skill I'll never master." 

"Practice, perfection, you know the drill." Gentle, skilled hands tugged at her cheekbones, traced beneath her eyes with an artist's patience and gift for transformation. "That's a beautiful hat you packed - where in the world did you find it? It must be, well-"

"Nearly as old as you? A little shop in Bloomsbury with a beautiful raincoat in the window. My eyes must have lit up, and Joe plucked it right up for me. I had one just like it when I was a girl and he left on the train. I thought he'd like to see it one more time." It wouldn't do to cry again - her tears could wait for a patch of earth in Langrune-sur-Mer, where Michael had been laid to earth. He'd died in a swath of nylon and silk, from Joe's own factories, and it was a small comfort that something of home surrounded him so far above the battered world beneath him. They could wait to water the soil of Laventie, where Ian's grave had stood so long, a simple, unassuming grave for a simple, unassuming man.

Something cool and heavy pressed into her hand, and she looked down to a galaxy of blue and silver swirling against her fingers. It was a dime-store trinket, cheap and light, but Guinevere knew it was priceless as anything behind glass or atop a queen's head.

"Michael bought it for me, the first time we had cash left and food in the fridge. He was sorry he couldn't give me more, but it was the damn Hope Diamond to me." Sarah's hand closed over hers, a pale blue light glimmering between them. "We want to look good for our boys - it's an important day."

For all their boys, the living and the dead, so long as days had meaning. Guinevere smiled and bowed her head to the gravity of memory, the weight of love and time.

 


End file.
